The point of freedom of speech is so that everyone can voice their political opinion. The new law does not punish people who send e-mails with links to credit card advertisements. RTFA before screaming "Constitution!" The new law bans sending messages to children related to such things as pornography, illegal or prescription drugs, alcohol, tobacco, gambling, firearms, or fireworks. While the government cannot exercise prior restraint to prevent people from advertising illegal services such as these they are well within their right to punish people advertising illegal services, which they are doing when they advertise to minors.
Now if you can explain how the intent of the First Amendment is to prevent the state governments from punishing people who send unwanted and inappropriate e-mails I will gladly concede my point.
First the Norwegian/Peruvian government stops depending on Office (except maybe to help convert documents into.swx), then people will start wondering why their $300 Office suite from last year refuses to read government documents when this free Office suite opens them just fine. Local businesses (especially legal departments) and citizens might wonder why they are paying $300/license to use software that doesn't open government documents when they can download an office suite that does for free.
While I don't expect everyone to switch, I expect that this removes a serious incentive for Norwegian companies (especially law firms) to use M$ Office. All of a sudden the government managed to switch and it's no harder to use OpenOffice. Maybe Sweden or Finland will be next and if a couple countries in the EU start using free formats pretty soon EU documents will be done is free formats as well as proprietary, making it further easier for people, businesses, and other governments to switch from M$. The EU won't want to do this until they are pretty sure that it will work, and a member nation doing it is a good way to show that it will.
These Supremes answered the wrong question. They were asked to validate or repudiate the lower court's opinion. Which was that when Grokster does not promote criminal use, the software has has "substantial legal use", Grokster does not know when an illegal transaction occurs, and Grokster does not even itself have the power to bar a specific person from making a transaction, Grokster cannot be liable for a criminal transaction by a user.
Maybe you haven't read the Opinion of the Court yet so I'll go ahead and break it to you: they answered the question that was asked with a repudiation of the lower court's opinion on the grounds that they disagreed that Grokster did not promote criminal use.
I quote the Opinion: "Evidence of active steps taken to encourage direct infringement, such as advertising an infringing use or instructing how to engage in an infringing use, shows an affirmative intent that the product be used to infringe, and overcomes the law's reluctance to find liability when a defendant merely sells a commercial product suitable for some lawful use."
And then the Opinion goes on to state: "First, each of the respondents showed itself to be aiming to satisfy a known source of demand for copyright infringement, the market comprising former Napster users. Respondents' efforts to supply services to former Napster users indicate a principal, if not exclusive, intent to bring about infringement. Second, neither respondent attempted to develop filtering tools or other mechanisms to diminish the infringing activity using their software. While the Ninth Circuit treated that failure as irrelevant because respondents lacked an independent duty to monitor their users' activity, this evidence underscores their intentional facilitation of their users' infringement."
The Court isn't leaving any room for a lower court to rule any other way without directly contradicting the Court so I would say that this case is over and I personally think the Court did a good job of limiting the effects of this case to a clarification of the precendent they set down in the Betamax Case, even if that clarification isn't unanimously the best ruling according to/.ers (in other words, I don't see this hurting BitTorrent).
I like the theory of it, but I still see some stupid-ass moderations around here.
So I'm looking at your post and it's modded +5, Insightful.
...
I think this is an excellent example of the truth of your post.
Hrm, you can think of this two ways so I'll outline what they are and clarify what I meant. 1)Your post should not have been moderated up despite its truth. 2)What kind of moderator moderates +5, Insightful someone who calls moderators stupid? Either your post was correct and the moderators are stupid or maybe they're less stupid than you think and they're just screwing with you. Dang this is confusing, I don't even remember what I meant anymore.
The images from Pasadena are well over 2 years old. I know because they recently tore up a baseball field and built an underground parking structure (which they just finished) and the construction started about 2 years ago (and finishing got delayed until now), and the picture had the old baseball field there, no construction or anything. Not the most current, but like you said pretty cool nonetheless.
-Scott
My recommendation is to put a nice RAID array in a different computer. I suggest RAID 5 because it is more efficient ("wastes" less space on redundancy and still gets the job done) than RAID 1 but they have roughly equal reliability. The advantage is that it's an entirely separate computer and you even have redundant backups. Hell, you could even put it off-site, but then the connection speeds drop a bit. If you use a RAID array on your local machine you may be tempted to treat the RAID like it is itself a backup (it isn't!) and while I've never had an issue with a motherboard frying all the hard drives in a system, maybe it could happen, and double failures aren't unheard of, but if you have your originals and redundant backups I think you'll be ok (since that's effectively 3 copies).
It also wouldn't hurt to have a firewire drive for backing up pictures and video while you're on the road or something (I don't know if you have a laptop) or are really paranoid about certain irreplacable things.
Just my 2 cents.
See the problem is that all of the witnesses to the lasers in Real Genious are either too busy partying or eating popcorn whereas the Death Star gunners have nothing to do until they get to Yavin but brag about their "laser", the germs destroyed the Martians in War of the Worlds and so left survivors to tell the tale, the ID4 lasers didn't finish the job and eliminate all of the witnesses like they were supposed to, and the Star Trek phasers/lasers...didn't do much. While even the crotch laser is pretty good, Austin Powers kicks ass and defeated Dr. Evil anyway. I maintain that Real Genius had the best use for a laser and that it was only because of its pure awesomeness that it didn't make it on the list; that's right, it's too good for the list.
This dust cloud was first published in 1989 in the Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society.
According to "The Age of Gliese 879 and Fomalhaut" in APJ v.475, p.313 (1997) Fomalhaut is 200 +/- 100 million years old. While this is a large margin of error, this still confirms that circumstellar dust disks can persist in A stars for several hundred megayears, which it is believed can then form planets.
According to Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society v.334, p.589 (2002) it is estimated that the ring has the mass of 20-30 Earths.
While not known for certain "Submillimeter Observations of an Asymmetric Dust Disk around Fomalhaut" in APJ v.582, p.1141-46 (2003) implies that the ring offset and the clump with 5% the mass of the ring is likely caused by a large planet close to the star, but I don't know what this no-visible-planet observation means for that theory. Dark matter?
And I could not for the life of me find the distance that ring is from Fomalhaut. Anyone know?
And thanks for that link to the Eye of Sauron, I had been wondering what that was.
I am more than slightly concerned about the lack of RAID in the system. They said that they had some sort of painful experience with RAID 5 not scaling to petabyte-size storage and therefore recommend JBOD. I wouldn't expect RAID 5 to scale to petabyte-size storage because of the parity all being done at once and in the same place but there has to be a way around this that still allows for redundancy. Take a RAID 50, with a lot of RAID 5 arrays in the hundred-terabyte range and a RAID 0 array striping over them, still provide redundancy with only slightly greater inefficiency and dividing up the parity process to the smaller RAID 5 arrays.
Also, $2/GB seems kind of high to me, given that hard drive prices are down to $0.33/GB and you're putting 4 in each mass produced box.
I've sent e-mails/online feedback to both my US Representative (Cox, R-CA) and one of my Senators (Feinstein) on occasion. I got replies to both and while I wasn't horribly impressed by Feinstein's reply it did indicate that it was read since the reply was on-topic. Congressman Cox replyed via USPS, instead of e-mail, and I was impressed with his reply. Were the e-mails worth my time? Maybe, but I was doing my duty as a citizen and it was more worth my time than some other duties (like going to jury duty and never even going into the jurybox to be asked about being on a jury). At worst though, they still weren't counterproductive.
I must agree with the phone call suggestion here for one reason, it's immediate. Something like this with a 48-hour deadline does not afford one the luxury to send an e-mail which doesn't need to be read for a week.
2. Punishments generally reflect how hard it is to catch a crime, not how much damage it causes. This is why you can go to prison for 209320938 years just for copying a movie for your friend.
This, my fellow American, is a major difference between the United States and Europe. You should realize that after 200 years the deterrent ceases to have any effect because even if you get out early, it's still in a coffin not to mention the fact that if they if it's that hard to catch them, juries might get used to convicting people on sparse evidence and then wrongfully convict someone. People don't think more than a couple months ahead when it comes to credit card bills, why would they think 209 million years ahead?
I refer you to the article:
One purpose of these very rapid flights is to help understand the extreme conditions found within the interiors of giant planets in our solar system. By creating states of matter extremely difficult to achieve on Earth, the flyer plates provide hard data to astrophysicists speculating on the structure and even the formation of planets like Jupiter and Saturn.
What's more, this is 3 times Earth escape velocity and so if one had a huge heat sheild it would be a good way to help launch things using less fuel - one could start the rocket launch using this rail gun and then fire up the conventional rockets once the rocket has a bunch of inertia and some significant initial altitude. If you're only trying to put it in Low Earth Orbit this should be a huge help since LEO is still pretty far in the Earth gravitational field (so that the velocity require to put something into LEO is well below this speed).
What will happen when Apple goes bankrupt? When Apple goes bankrupt, who will prevent you from deciding to de-DRM your music using Hymn or some other program? Presumably the reason you haven't yet is because iTunes only like DRMed music from the iTunes Music Store, something which will no longer be a factor when Apple supposedly goes bankrupt (now that they are switching to Intel of course).
But what if I want one copy for my MP3 player, one on a CD for my car, and one for my wifes car? Easy, you sync it to your iPod and burn two CDs. I also recommend archiving a copy and a de-DRM program. But you still only bought 1 copy and didn't even ask to play it on multiple computers or iPods yet. It's not perfect, but its better than most of your other options.
It's really quite simple: the first derivative of linux use (growth) is positive, but the second derivative (acceleration) is negative. Let's just all hope that the third derivative is positive.
(If for example 2 people are using computers and one replaces his 2x in a 3 year period and the other only does once, market-share dynamics dictate that one demographic has 75% market share while the other has only 25% -- even though install base is still 50/50.)
Let's go over this: Person A buys a peecee but feels compelled to upgrade later (by buying a new computer) resulting in an 2 peecees purchased while Person B buys a Mac only once. The install base is 50/50 but the market share shows that 2/3 of computers bought are peecees and only 1/3 are Macs. Where did the 75%/25% come from?
Now that we've established that your summary sucked (no offense), should I bother reading the article? It is/.
On another note, in the Astrophysics Department here at Caltech, I'd say something like a fifth of the install base is Windows, the rest being Macs and Linux (with more Mac laptops and linux desktops) and several other non-engineering science departments have many more Macs than Windows boxen but if you want me to believe that a macs make up 16% you've better have some really good data out there that no one else does.
Don't be an @$$. Remember how annoying it was when people said that sites only displayed right in IE 5.5 or "better"? Yeah, you do. Did that get you to use IE? No, it didn't, unless it was your bank or something. So guess what? 90% of people won't go to your non-IE site. Period.
I know if I had less homework I wouldn't be up at 3:00 AM wasting time on/.
I would be sleeping now and doing actual research during the day instead of working all night and sleeping never and posting to/. so I have have a break.
An inductor is not a battery but stores electrical energy in the form of current and it probably what they use in this case. Also, a capacitor is not a battery and stores a charge. If I RTFA then I might be able to tell you which this probably uses, but I didn't.
-Scott
The problem with first steps (whether it be Congress's legislation or international treaties) is that because it's a first step and getting agreement it hard enough they can't accomplish very much and, yet, after the first step has been taken no one feels the need to take another step. My guess is that this legislation is too weak to accomplish anything and nothing will really be done until it becomes a big enough problem that the politicians can't say that they worked on it and are waiting for it to take effect or some BS like that.
Now if they had only made it part of the DMCA, then we would get some quality legal action going by the **AA and we might actually solve the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't pay more than $300 for it. But that's just me.
Let's go over this:
The point of freedom of speech is so that everyone can voice their political opinion. The new law does not punish people who send e-mails with links to credit card advertisements. RTFA before screaming "Constitution!" The new law bans sending messages to children related to such things as pornography, illegal or prescription drugs, alcohol, tobacco, gambling, firearms, or fireworks. While the government cannot exercise prior restraint to prevent people from advertising illegal services such as these they are well within their right to punish people advertising illegal services, which they are doing when they advertise to minors.
Now if you can explain how the intent of the First Amendment is to prevent the state governments from punishing people who send unwanted and inappropriate e-mails I will gladly concede my point.
First the Norwegian/Peruvian government stops depending on Office (except maybe to help convert documents into .swx), then people will start wondering why their $300 Office suite from last year refuses to read government documents when this free Office suite opens them just fine. Local businesses (especially legal departments) and citizens might wonder why they are paying $300/license to use software that doesn't open government documents when they can download an office suite that does for free.
While I don't expect everyone to switch, I expect that this removes a serious incentive for Norwegian companies (especially law firms) to use M$ Office. All of a sudden the government managed to switch and it's no harder to use OpenOffice. Maybe Sweden or Finland will be next and if a couple countries in the EU start using free formats pretty soon EU documents will be done is free formats as well as proprietary, making it further easier for people, businesses, and other governments to switch from M$. The EU won't want to do this until they are pretty sure that it will work, and a member nation doing it is a good way to show that it will.
These Supremes answered the wrong question. They were asked to validate or repudiate the lower court's opinion. Which was that when Grokster does not promote criminal use, the software has has "substantial legal use", Grokster does not know when an illegal transaction occurs, and Grokster does not even itself have the power to bar a specific person from making a transaction, Grokster cannot be liable for a criminal transaction by a user.
Maybe you haven't read the Opinion of the Court yet so I'll go ahead and break it to you: they answered the question that was asked with a repudiation of the lower court's opinion on the grounds that they disagreed that Grokster did not promote criminal use.
I quote the Opinion: "Evidence of active steps taken to encourage direct infringement, such as advertising an infringing use or instructing how to engage in an infringing use, shows an affirmative intent that the product be used to infringe, and overcomes the law's reluctance to find liability when a defendant merely sells a commercial product suitable for some lawful use."
And then the Opinion goes on to state: "First, each of the respondents showed itself to be aiming to satisfy a known source of demand for copyright infringement, the market comprising former Napster users. Respondents' efforts to supply services to former Napster users indicate a principal, if not exclusive, intent to bring about infringement. Second, neither respondent attempted to develop filtering tools or other mechanisms to diminish the infringing activity using their software. While the Ninth Circuit treated that failure as irrelevant because respondents lacked an independent duty to monitor their users' activity, this evidence underscores their intentional facilitation of their users' infringement."
The Court isn't leaving any room for a lower court to rule any other way without directly contradicting the Court so I would say that this case is over and I personally think the Court did a good job of limiting the effects of this case to a clarification of the precendent they set down in the Betamax Case, even if that clarification isn't unanimously the best ruling according to /.ers (in other words, I don't see this hurting BitTorrent).
I like the theory of it, but I still see some stupid-ass moderations around here.
So I'm looking at your post and it's modded +5, Insightful.
...
I think this is an excellent example of the truth of your post.
Hrm, you can think of this two ways so I'll outline what they are and clarify what I meant. 1)Your post should not have been moderated up despite its truth. 2)What kind of moderator moderates +5, Insightful someone who calls moderators stupid? Either your post was correct and the moderators are stupid or maybe they're less stupid than you think and they're just screwing with you. Dang this is confusing, I don't even remember what I meant anymore.
::sigh:: Time to go for a walk.
If you search for weapons of mass destruction they're all in one place here .
For some reason, if you try zooming in all the way you will notice that they "don't have imagery at this zoom level" which seems convenient to me.
Let's hope that the US government doesn't find out about this information lea^$*H^%&E%(&%L^&P*(^&%^*!
The images from Pasadena are well over 2 years old. I know because they recently tore up a baseball field and built an underground parking structure (which they just finished) and the construction started about 2 years ago (and finishing got delayed until now), and the picture had the old baseball field there, no construction or anything. Not the most current, but like you said pretty cool nonetheless. -Scott
It only costs $250 for 500 GB too!
My recommendation is to put a nice RAID array in a different computer. I suggest RAID 5 because it is more efficient ("wastes" less space on redundancy and still gets the job done) than RAID 1 but they have roughly equal reliability. The advantage is that it's an entirely separate computer and you even have redundant backups. Hell, you could even put it off-site, but then the connection speeds drop a bit. If you use a RAID array on your local machine you may be tempted to treat the RAID like it is itself a backup (it isn't!) and while I've never had an issue with a motherboard frying all the hard drives in a system, maybe it could happen, and double failures aren't unheard of, but if you have your originals and redundant backups I think you'll be ok (since that's effectively 3 copies). It also wouldn't hurt to have a firewire drive for backing up pictures and video while you're on the road or something (I don't know if you have a laptop) or are really paranoid about certain irreplacable things. Just my 2 cents.
See the problem is that all of the witnesses to the lasers in Real Genious are either too busy partying or eating popcorn whereas the Death Star gunners have nothing to do until they get to Yavin but brag about their "laser", the germs destroyed the Martians in War of the Worlds and so left survivors to tell the tale, the ID4 lasers didn't finish the job and eliminate all of the witnesses like they were supposed to, and the Star Trek phasers/lasers...didn't do much. While even the crotch laser is pretty good, Austin Powers kicks ass and defeated Dr. Evil anyway. I maintain that Real Genius had the best use for a laser and that it was only because of its pure awesomeness that it didn't make it on the list; that's right, it's too good for the list.
I had to come up with some reasoning there.
gdbg
This dust cloud was first published in 1989 in the Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society.
According to "The Age of Gliese 879 and Fomalhaut" in APJ v.475, p.313 (1997) Fomalhaut is 200 +/- 100 million years old. While this is a large margin of error, this still confirms that circumstellar dust disks can persist in A stars for several hundred megayears, which it is believed can then form planets.
According to Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society v.334, p.589 (2002) it is estimated that the ring has the mass of 20-30 Earths.
While not known for certain "Submillimeter Observations of an Asymmetric Dust Disk around Fomalhaut" in APJ v.582, p.1141-46 (2003) implies that the ring offset and the clump with 5% the mass of the ring is likely caused by a large planet close to the star, but I don't know what this no-visible-planet observation means for that theory. Dark matter?
And I could not for the life of me find the distance that ring is from Fomalhaut. Anyone know?
And thanks for that link to the Eye of Sauron, I had been wondering what that was.
I am more than slightly concerned about the lack of RAID in the system. They said that they had some sort of painful experience with RAID 5 not scaling to petabyte-size storage and therefore recommend JBOD. I wouldn't expect RAID 5 to scale to petabyte-size storage because of the parity all being done at once and in the same place but there has to be a way around this that still allows for redundancy. Take a RAID 50, with a lot of RAID 5 arrays in the hundred-terabyte range and a RAID 0 array striping over them, still provide redundancy with only slightly greater inefficiency and dividing up the parity process to the smaller RAID 5 arrays. Also, $2/GB seems kind of high to me, given that hard drive prices are down to $0.33/GB and you're putting 4 in each mass produced box.
But, yeah, like he said. Avalanche isn't supposed to take over the world. It isn't a product, and it doesn't exist in source code form.
Fine, it isn't a product and doesn't have any source code, but I'm pretty sure that Microsoft still intends it to take over the world.
I've sent e-mails/online feedback to both my US Representative (Cox, R-CA) and one of my Senators (Feinstein) on occasion. I got replies to both and while I wasn't horribly impressed by Feinstein's reply it did indicate that it was read since the reply was on-topic. Congressman Cox replyed via USPS, instead of e-mail, and I was impressed with his reply. Were the e-mails worth my time? Maybe, but I was doing my duty as a citizen and it was more worth my time than some other duties (like going to jury duty and never even going into the jurybox to be asked about being on a jury). At worst though, they still weren't counterproductive.
I must agree with the phone call suggestion here for one reason, it's immediate. Something like this with a 48-hour deadline does not afford one the luxury to send an e-mail which doesn't need to be read for a week.
2. Punishments generally reflect how hard it is to catch a crime, not how much damage it causes. This is why you can go to prison for 209320938 years just for copying a movie for your friend.
This, my fellow American, is a major difference between the United States and Europe. You should realize that after 200 years the deterrent ceases to have any effect because even if you get out early, it's still in a coffin not to mention the fact that if they if it's that hard to catch them, juries might get used to convicting people on sparse evidence and then wrongfully convict someone. People don't think more than a couple months ahead when it comes to credit card bills, why would they think 209 million years ahead?
I refer you to the article:
One purpose of these very rapid flights is to help understand the extreme conditions found within the interiors of giant planets in our solar system. By creating states of matter extremely difficult to achieve on Earth, the flyer plates provide hard data to astrophysicists speculating on the structure and even the formation of planets like Jupiter and Saturn.
What's more, this is 3 times Earth escape velocity and so if one had a huge heat sheild it would be a good way to help launch things using less fuel - one could start the rocket launch using this rail gun and then fire up the conventional rockets once the rocket has a bunch of inertia and some significant initial altitude. If you're only trying to put it in Low Earth Orbit this should be a huge help since LEO is still pretty far in the Earth gravitational field (so that the velocity require to put something into LEO is well below this speed).
What will happen when Apple goes bankrupt?
When Apple goes bankrupt, who will prevent you from deciding to de-DRM your music using Hymn or some other program? Presumably the reason you haven't yet is because iTunes only like DRMed music from the iTunes Music Store, something which will no longer be a factor when Apple supposedly goes bankrupt (now that they are switching to Intel of course).
But what if I want one copy for my MP3 player, one on a CD for my car, and one for my wifes car?
Easy, you sync it to your iPod and burn two CDs. I also recommend archiving a copy and a de-DRM program. But you still only bought 1 copy and didn't even ask to play it on multiple computers or iPods yet. It's not perfect, but its better than most of your other options.
It's really quite simple: the first derivative of linux use (growth) is positive, but the second derivative (acceleration) is negative. Let's just all hope that the third derivative is positive.
(If for example 2 people are using computers and one replaces his 2x in a 3 year period and the other only does once, market-share dynamics dictate that one demographic has 75% market share while the other has only 25% -- even though install base is still 50/50.)
Let's go over this: Person A buys a peecee but feels compelled to upgrade later (by buying a new computer) resulting in an 2 peecees purchased while Person B buys a Mac only once. The install base is 50/50 but the market share shows that 2/3 of computers bought are peecees and only 1/3 are Macs. Where did the 75%/25% come from?
Now that we've established that your summary sucked (no offense), should I bother reading the article? It is /.
On another note, in the Astrophysics Department here at Caltech, I'd say something like a fifth of the install base is Windows, the rest being Macs and Linux (with more Mac laptops and linux desktops) and several other non-engineering science departments have many more Macs than Windows boxen but if you want me to believe that a macs make up 16% you've better have some really good data out there that no one else does.
so a few people mess up and we are going to hit EVERY business owner with a fine (increased costs of doing business due to destroying docs = fine)?
Because it costs so much money to safely dispose of papers:
This method or this method?
Caltech economics at work!
Don't be an @$$. Remember how annoying it was when people said that sites only displayed right in IE 5.5 or "better"? Yeah, you do. Did that get you to use IE? No, it didn't, unless it was your bank or something. So guess what? 90% of people won't go to your non-IE site. Period.
I know if I had less homework I wouldn't be up at 3:00 AM wasting time on /.
I would be sleeping now and doing actual research during the day instead of working all night and sleeping never and posting to /. so I have have a break.
An inductor is not a battery but stores electrical energy in the form of current and it probably what they use in this case. Also, a capacitor is not a battery and stores a charge. If I RTFA then I might be able to tell you which this probably uses, but I didn't. -Scott
The problem with first steps (whether it be Congress's legislation or international treaties) is that because it's a first step and getting agreement it hard enough they can't accomplish very much and, yet, after the first step has been taken no one feels the need to take another step. My guess is that this legislation is too weak to accomplish anything and nothing will really be done until it becomes a big enough problem that the politicians can't say that they worked on it and are waiting for it to take effect or some BS like that.
Now if they had only made it part of the DMCA, then we would get some quality legal action going by the **AA and we might actually solve the problem.
All I have to say is that the moderators must really be looking hard for uses for those mod points for this to get modded +5 Insightful.